Popcorn

by Ben Elton

“Oh, I see,” he said. “A deep and painful wound, but not quite deep and painful enough for you to notice until you paid some guy thousands of dollars to point it out.”

  “He didn’t say that!” Dale said as Dove relived her terrible experience on the following morning.

  “He did say it,” Dove protested. “Everybody heard.”

  “Let me get this straight here.” Oliver adjusted his glasses and peered at the imaginary notes he’d been making. “He utterly denied the validity of the terrible emotional abuse you’d suffered? He accused you of making it up?”

  “Yes, he did, Oliver.”

  “Is that legal? I’m not sure that’s even legal.” Oliver glanced about a bit. He liked to give the impression that behind the camera was a crack team of lawyers and researchers who would leap into action at the merest nod from the great man. In fact, behind the camera were a woman holding a powder brush and a woman holding a plastic cup full of water.

  “So what did you do?” asked Dale. “What did you say?”

  “I said, “Mr Delamitri, just because you have made a lot of money exploiting the pain and suffering of others, that does not give you the right to exploit mine.” ”

  “Way to go, girlfriend,” said Dale.

  “Right on, sister,” said Oliver. “We’ll be back after this.”

  “As a woman you have a right to firm, uplifted breasts, no matter what your age.”

  Dove lied on Coffee Time. In reality she had not been so courageous. Actually she had just stood there, tears of confusion forming in her eyes, wondering why this man was being so mean.

  “Anyway, what’s a little pain?” Bruce said. “I mean, what would you be without that pain?”

  “Excuse me?” Dove sniffed.

  “I’ll tell you. You’d be the same pointless and self-indulgent idiot that God made you, but you wouldn’t have anyone to blame it on.”

  Dove was fighting back the tears now. What had gone wrong? People were supposed to cluck sympathetically when you told them about your emotional abuse, not emotionally abuse you.

  “Take it easy, Bruce. You’ve had a couple.” An old friend of Bruce’s tried to lead him away, having decided that both Bruce and the company that distributed his movies might regret this behaviour in the morning.

  “And I shall tell you why I’ve had a couple,” Bruce answered triumphantly. “Because I have an addictive personality, that’s why. You know how I know? A court told me so. Oh yes it did, when I got busted for drink-driving. That was my plea. That’s what I said. Not ‘I’m sorry your honour, I’m an irresponsible shit’ but ‘I can’t help it. I have an addictive personality’. I drank the booze, I drove the car but it wasn’t my fault! I had a problem you see and it saved me a prison term…Hey, Michael!”

  A huge movie star was passing. He turned at Bruce’s call, delighted to be hailed by someone of equal celebrity.

  “Getting any at the moment?” Bruce enquired.

  It was a cheap shot and it touched a nerve. The star had recently been exposed in the press as a serial adulterer. He turned away without further acknowledging Bruce.

  “Addicted to sex,” Bruce explained to Dove. “Did you read that? He said it to Vanity Fair after being caught in bed with various ladies to whom he was not married. He said he was addicted to sex. Not just a gutless, cheating little fuck-rat, you notice. No. A sex addict. He had a problem, so it was not his fault.”

  A little crowd had gathered by now, which was a considerable relief to Dove. She was extremely pleased no longer to be the sole target of Bruce’s anger.

  “Nothing is anybody’s fault. We don’t do wrong, we have problems. We’re victims, alcoholics, sexaholics. Do you know you can be a shopaholic? That’s right. People aren’t greedy any more, oh no. They’re shopaholics, victims of commercialism. Victims! People don’t fail any more. They experience negative success. We are building a culture of gutless, spineless, self-righteous, whining cry-babies who have an excuse for everything and take responsibility for nothing…”

  “He mentioned shopaholics?” Oliver asked on the following morning. “Do you think that possibly, in some weird, uncanny, unconscious way, he was connecting there with the Mall Murderers? After all, what are malls full of? Shops, right?”

  “Right,” said Dove, but slightly hesitantly.

  “And what are shops full of? Shopaholics!”

  “And murderers,” Dale added helpfully.

  “Exactly,” said Oliver. “Maybe, in some weird, uncanny, unconscious way, Bruce Delamitri knew what was coming.”

  “I am threatened by your attitude,” said Dove.

  She could not have said a worse thing.

  “Threatened? My God! So what? Who cares? I’m crying here. We all feel threatened, babe. You should be threatened with a baseball bat sometime and get things into perspective. There was a time when if someone said something you didn’t like you told them to shove it. Now you go to court and say you’ve been conversationally harassed.”

  “Bruce, please.” His friend was still trying to calm him down, but Bruce wasn’t talking to him, or to Dove. He was talking to Professor Chambers and Dale and Oliver and the MAD mothers and the two mad psychos who were out there somewhere, stealing his plots.

  “Victims! Everyone is a fucking victim these days, and we’ve all got our victim-support groups. Blacks, whites, old, young, men, women, gays, straights. Everybody looking for an excuse to fail. Well, it’ll kill us all, that’s what it’ll do. A society which defines its component groups by their weaknesses is going to die. We are losing more kids a year to violence than we did in the Vietnam war. But do we blame the violent people? No, we blame my fucking movies!”

  “Go home, Bruce,” said his friend.

  People were already drifting away. Dove had turned on her heel in disgust. His friend was right. It was Bruce’s night but he’d spoilt it. He was bored and boring. He decided he should go.

  Then he saw Brooke.

  Through the glittering hordes, way, way out across the bosom shelf he saw her: Brooke Daniels. Coincidence or what? Synchronisity surely. Everybody has some special fantasy figure, a particular pop singer or actor that comes number one in the ‘if you could have anyone for a night who would you have?’ party game. Up until a couple of days before Bruce would probably have answered Michelle Pfiefer in her Batwoman costume. Then he had happened to be glancing through a copy of Playboy Magazine at his agents office. Brooke had leapt instantly to the top of Bruce’s league. And now here she was, in the flesh, looking even better without the creases and the staples.

  “Excuse me,” he said to anybody who cared to hear it, and plunged into the crowd, pushing his way through to where the woman of some of his more recent dreams was talking to a small man in a hired tuxedo.

  “Hi, pardon me for butting in but I won ‘Best Picture’, so I can do what the hell I like.” All Bruce’s angry petulance disappeared instantly and was replaced by his more familiar charm.

  “Not at all, Mr Delamitri, and congratulations. I’m Brooke Daniels.” Brooke smiled, pulling back her shoulders the tiniest fraction in order to add further lift to her magnificent figure.

  “I know who you are. I saw the Playboy spread — it was wonderful.”

  “Thank you. I don’t seem to be able to get away from that. I do acting too, you know.”

  The little fellow in the borrowed tux shifted from one leg to the other, which was not a long journey.

  Brooke remembered her manners. “This is…I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Kevin.”

  “Oh yes, of course, Kevin. This is Kevin. He’s from Wales, in England. This is Bruce Delamitri, Kevin.”

  “I know,” said Kevin. “I saw Ordinary Americans. Bloody hell, I’m glad I didn’t take my gran.”

  There didn’t seem to be an obvious answer to this, so Bruce didn’t offer one. Brooke hastened to fill the silence that followed, feeling for some reason that the responsibilities of playing hostess lay with
her.

  “Kevin’s a winner too, Bruce. ‘Best Foreign Animated Short’. It’s about a boy called Midget—”

  “Widget,” Kevin corrected her.

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Brooke. “And he has a pair of magic Y-fronts. What are Y-fronts, Kevin?”

  “Underpants. They’re called Y-fronts because they have an inverted Y on the front, which provides an orifice through which a bloke can poke his old fella.” Kevin hoped she’d find his British bluntness charming.

  “Oh, I see.” It didn’t look as if she did.

  Bruce decided it was time to get rid of the Welshman. “Wait a minute, you mean you’re Kevin?” he said, light apparently suddenly dawning. “The guy that makes the animated shorts? Jesus, are you a lucky guy! Sharon Stone is looking for you…Yes, that’s right, she wants to talk about your Widget…No I’m not kidding…I don’t know, maybe she likes Welsh guys, but she told me that when she saw your movie it made her nipples hard…That is what she said, word for word: it made her nipples hard…You’d better go talk to her.”

  In a pub back home Kevin might have spotted that he was the victim of a less than elaborate hoax, but at the Governor’s party? Talking to Bruce Delamitri? He had just won an Oscar, after all, so surely anything was possible, even the notion that the work of the Welsh Cartoon Collective (in association with the Arts Council of Great Britain, Channel Four Wales and some high street bank’s Youth Initiative) could make Sharon Stone’s nipples go hard. He thanked Bruce for the tip and scurried off.

  “That was a little cruel, wasn’t it?” Brooke enquired.

  “No way. How many guys get to spend five minutes of their life believing Sharon Stone is interested in them?”

  Bruce felt much better already. “Great dress,” he volunteered, and of course what he meant was great body, the dress, such as it was, being merely what might be called garnish, or figure-dressing.

  “Thanks. Bold, I’ll admit, but it’s tough to make an impact these days. Did you see the Baywatch Babes make an entrance? It was like silicone valley in earthquake season. It’s getting so that the only women who get noticed are the tattooed lesbians from New Zealand.”

  A little later they danced. It caused quite a stir, Bruce being nearly at the end of a very public divorce.

  “Can I say something embarrassing?” Brooke asked.

  “Sure.” Bruce hoped desperately she wasn’t going to comment on the fact that he had been pushing his erection against her stomach for the past five minutes.

  “I didn’t see your picture. The one you got the Oscar for, Ordinary Americans.”

  For some reason Bruce was pleased. “That’s OK, I don’t insist. It’s probably just as well, anyway. Maybe you’d have gone out and shot up a shopping mall.”

  For a moment the bitter memory of his speech intruded on Bruce’s burgeoning seduction. He forced such unhappy thoughts from his mind and concentrated on the extraordinary body he held in his arms.

  For her own part, Brooke seemed to feel that some apology was called for. “I can’t imagine how I didn’t get to see it.”

  “Well, I guess you just never visited a movie theatre when it was playing…”

  They danced for a moment in silence. Bruce had a thought. It was so long since he’d asked a girl to leave a party with him he’d been wondering how to broach the subject. Now Brooke had offered him the perfect opening.

  “Maybe you’d like to see it now?”

  “Now?”

  “Sure. I have a print at the studio. We could grab some beers and dumb bits of cracker with blobs of caviare on them and go watch it on my editing machine.”

  “My God, I’ve had guys ask me to the movies before, but this is the first time the guy with the Oscar offered me a private view. Quite a date.”

  “So you’ll come?”

  “No, I have netball practice. Of course I’ll come, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Great. I think you’ll like the picture. One word of warning though: it does contain scenes of graphic violence.”

  TWELVE

  INTERIOR. NIGHT. A 7-11 STORE.

  A robbery is in progress. Terrified customers and staff lie on the floor with their hands on their heads. Standing over them are WAYNE and SCOUT, poor white trash murdering hoods on a killing spree. They are both heavily armed. Wayne is in his early twenties. He wears work boots, jeans and a torn vest, and has tattoos on his muscular arms. Scout is a waif-like girl in her late teens. She has on pink Doc Martens boots and a girlish little cotton summer dress. Clearly, there has already been a terrible incident: there is money scattered about everywhere, and two or three dead or dying people lie among the cowering customers. Wayne and Scout are both hysterically elated. He grips her to him.

  WAYNE: (SHOUTS WILDLY)

  I love you, sugar pie!

  SCOUT: I love you too, honey.

  They embrace. A customer, a fat man lying face-down on the floor, still holding a half-eaten hamburger near his mouth, steals a glance at Wayne and Scout Wayne is chewing on Scout’s ear. Close-up on Wayne’s face as he turns away from Scout’s head to notice that the fat man is looking at him.

  WAYNE: You like to watch, fat boy?

  The terrified man says nothing. His answer is to bury his face in the floor as hard as he can and wrap his arms around his head. Wayne’s POV is now just the top of the man’s balding head with his pudgy hand pressed against it, holding the half-chewed burger. There is a loud bang and a hole appears in the top of the bald head. Blood runs out as if from a tap, not a spurt but a silent, almost gentle, welling-up, a small flood, so to speak, which quickly forms a large pool, soaking into the hamburger and turning it completely red.

  Cut back to Wayne, who is ignoring his victim completely, and is grinding his hips against Scout.

  WAYNE: Oh Sweet Jesus! Killing makes me horny! I’m going to screw you till your teeth rattle, baby.

  Wayne’s strong hands clutch at Scout’s buttocks. It is almost as if his fingers will push through the flimsy cotton.

  Cut to close-up of the dead fat man’s hand gripping the blood-soaked burger. (NOTE: The impression should be that the burger and Scout’s backside are just two different pieces of meat to be devoured by men.)

  Cut back to full-length two shot of Wayne and Scout entwined in lust. Rock music is pumping in their heads and they seem almost to be dancing to it. If they are, it is a primitive, sexual dance, the dance of two wild animals caught between the two great life forces, survival and sex.

  WAYNE: C’mon, sugar.

  Wayne pulls Scout’s dress up round her waist, revealing her panties, which are decorated with little hearts or cute cartoon characters. Despite her obvious sexual passion, Scout remains coy and childlike.

  SCOUT: We are in a store, Wayne, a public place! We cain’t do no lovin’ right here now. There are people. They might see.

  WAYNE: No problem, baby doll.

  Wayne releases Scout and turns his machine-gun on the prostrate forms. They jolt like puppets as the bullets thud into them. Screams fill the air.

  We cut to a series of close-ups.

  A mother hugging a child hugging a doll, all suddenly riddled with bullets.

  A businessman weeping as he dies.

  A poster featuring a happy family shopping and saying, “if you have a problem please ask our staff if they can help.”

  A very wide shot of the whole store, a scene of bloody carnage with Wayne in the middle of it all, triumphantly spraying bullets. The muscles and veins on his brawny arms are taut with the tension of controlling the spitting machine-gun.

  Close-up of Scout. She is staring at Wayne, transfixed with adoration.

  The shooting finally subsides.

  WAYNE: Ain’t no people now, cotton candy, leastways not any going to get offended none.

  SCOUT: Oh Wayne, I surely do love you.

  Scout embraces Wayne. One slender, coltish leg, fragile-looking and vulnerable despite the big boots she wears, winds about him as she reaches u
p an arm to draw Wayne’s face to hers.

  THIRTEEN

  INTERIOR. NIGHT. THE LIVING AREA OF A RICH CALIFORNIAN HOME.

  A beautiful but rather impersonal interior of vast white couches, glass and steel tables and shelves. Clearly whoever lives here had the place designed for them. Wayne and Scout stand in the middle of the room. Their cheap, dirty, blood-stained clothes are in stark contrast to the cold pastel colours that surround them. They are hot and high with excitement. They have recently broken in and Scout is staring in wonder at this opulence. They both carry machine-guns and have more weapons hanging from them.

  Cut from the wide to a mid two shot as Wayne kisses Scout tenderly on the forehead.

  WAYNE: (Sudden exuberant shout)

  Ain’t nothing like killing, Scout. I done it all in my time, stock cars, broncos, gambling, stealing and I am here to tell you that there ain’t nothing to touch the thrill of killing.

  Close-up on Scout. Her eyes are closed; she is drinking in the atmosphere.

  SCOUT: Don’t shout, Wayne. I was just enjoying the peace. Isn’t it a beautiful home? Don’t you just love the silk cushions and glass coffee tables and all?

  Scout kicks off her shoes and walks about.

  Close-up of her feet luxuriating in the thick carpet and rugs.

  Pan up her legs. Her hands are against her thighs, playing nervously with her dress. She absently pulls the skirt up a little.

  We see bruising on her thigh. Two shot Wayne and Scout.

  WAYNE: You know why they have those glass coffee tables, precious? You want to know why they have them?

  SCOUT: So’s they can put their coffee down, Wayne.

  WAYNE: No it ain’t, baby. It’s so they can get underneath and watch each other take a dump.

  Close-up on Scout, her jaw dropping in astonishment.